kenneth writeth:
>Habermas argues that everyone who is not on board with
>communicative action is ideological. So everyone from Heller
>to Derrida is wrapped up in ideology.
what exactly is zizek doing when he rips apart various intellectual treatises or exposes sadism, perversion, masochism, blahbedeblah? everyone who's not on board with the uncola zizek is coke?
>Ideological
>perspectives have to be liquidated from discourse because,
>go figure, they are ideological (asymetrical).
it may look like hooey, it may even smell like hooey, but make no mistake it's hooey. now, is that any different?
>This is a political
>practice. Habermas's book, the Phil Dis of Mod is a political
>tract against everyone who has either lived in Paris or read
>Nietzsche. It's kinda twisted.
which makes most philosophical treatises twisted if you just substitute some other concept for Paris/Nietzsche.
>> [though he adds public sphere as something yet to be
>realized].
>
>Hmmm... he argues in his later work that the public sphere
>has been institutionalized in the form of democratic
>constitutions.
think: Aristotle's understanding of constitutions. the constitution is the form within which the ideals of democracy are embedded but must be realized in and through political practice.
think: marx's argument that capitalism brings about the socialization of production [institutionalized in the division of labor] which must be fully realized through revolutionary political practice to rid us of private property which obscures the socialized character of production and social life more generally.
>So it is already present, for the democratic.
>Funny side note - Habermas notes that democratic institutions
>relieve citizens of the burden of justificatory discourses....
you know, the grand either/or here is not particularly conducive to understanding habermas who's trying to circumvent that kind of thinking. you can't/refuse to accept what he's saying because you don't want to concede, at least out here, that in fact social life needs these shortcuts--these agreed upon rules, norms, habits of thought and action which make life simpler. there is nothing a priori wrong with that. what is wrong with them thus far is that they are shaped by capitalist, sexist, racist, etc relations of production. so, yes, they constrain us. but we can't lose sight of the fact that they are also liberating. it would not be a particularly 'free' world if we had to negotiate the rules that we agree to every damn time we assembled or did anything together.
institutions are both enabling and constraining. and if you don't like that b/c it sounds like durkheim well read foucault who, i hate to tell ya but i will anyway, read plenty of durkheim. [tho clearly he set about to reframe durkheim's conservative functionalism].
now, concretely this works like this: when i go to teach a class, both me and my students are spared a lot of frustration, time and agony because the institution of the academy is basically nothing more and nothing less than structured according to normative ideals and practices that *guide* [not dictate] our expectations of one another and ourselves. i don't have to stand there and tell them what to expect from me, what i expect from them, what a blackboard is, what chalk is, what books are and what to do with them, where and how to sit, etc because we all already know a lot of this.
otherwise we'd spend about 3 wks sorting all of this out. i still have to spell out some rules and expectations--in part because these are increasingly contested, in part because i'm a woman and don't carry as much authority, in part because i do things differently than the norm.
no kidding that institutions are shot through with power. but, the point, for habermas, is that ideally we'd create new institutions, norms and practices, that encourage us to question these power relations and, of course, getting rid of capitalism is the primary way in which this will be accomplished.
objecting to the idea of an institution as always and only constraining generally commits you to the ideology of liberal individualism--to ontological individualism ultimately-- which denies the ways in which the self is constituted by and constitutive of society, which denies anything but a negative conception of freedom as a freedom from society [and its institutions] which is always seen as bad and constraining to the individual which ostensibly exists outside of society.
>and, to follow Horkheimer and Adorno, doesn't this really
>mean that enlightenment relives subjects of the burden of
>thought?
and what, ken, is the primary force behind this? the ideational operations of rationalization? well huh, looks like you're stretching horkheimer's and adorno's weberian commitments waaaaaay farther than they ever wanted to take them.
kelley